With respect to handheld wireless devices, industrial design (ID) often takes priority over antenna performance. Therefore, antenna volume is often insufficient to contemporaneously cover all desired frequency ranges for certain communication techniques. Traditionally, tunable antennas have provided a way to circumvent this insufficiency by allowing an available impedance bandwidth to be moved in frequency to cover desired frequency ranges and still obtain acceptable Over the Air (OTA) performance. However, traditional tunable antennas are typically narrow banded and will only allow coverage of a limited number of frequency bands at any given time. This is often not suitable for devices supporting communication techniques that require wide coverage of frequency bands, for example coverage of multiple non-adjacent frequency bands in Carrier Aggregation (CA) with respect to Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks.
Bandwidth enhancing techniques can increase the impedance bandwidth of an antenna, which is advantageous for devices that support communication techniques requiring a wide coverage of frequency bands. However, many bandwidth enhancing techniques have traditionally not been considered practical solutions for use in tunable antenna concepts due to various complications associated with tunable antenna concepts.